So I admit to making one of the recipes without taking pictures. I made the veggie burgers after hanging out at the park with the kid after school on a hot day and didn’t even think of it until we were eating. But, as they made 12 burgers, I can at least give you a picture of the finished product since that’s what I had for dinner tonight. And YUM!

I’m sure this will eventually be on the VegTimes website

But this post is mainly about the fritters. As I said before, the Vegan Soul Food cookbook is always a winner, but perhaps I should have specified taste-wise. These fritters were certainly tasty, but a pain in the ass to cook.

As you can see from the feature image, I didn’t have black-eyed peas, but used soldier beans instead. I’m sure that didn’t matter.

I assure you this tasted better than it looks

I also didn’t fry in coconut oil. If I could afford to use 5 cups of coconut oil for frying, I could afford to have someone cook it for me too. Peanut oil was used instead.

And here is where all my shots got blurry

See all those little bits in the oil? That’s from the first batch that completely fell apart. It took a while to get the frying right so that they would brown, not burn, and stay together

Failed fritter and failed photo

But there was a lot of batter so we had enough for me to have a meal and Spouse to have half a meal (supplemented with ramen).

Would I make this again? Probably. And if I didn’t have seven different kinds of hot sauce in my pantry, I might even make the hot sauce to go with it (we used Alex’s Ugly Ghost Pepper sauce instead.) I would be more likely to make this for a group though as part of a larger meal. Two to three each is more than enough for an appetizer and it would benefit from being followed by a crisp salad to balance the oil.

Since we’re probably having pizza for dinner, I thought I’d post this one as I’m consuming the product rather than tomorrow.

So while many of my cookbooks have beverage recipes, Speakeasy is dedicated to cocktails. I had to do some modifications as my local booze shop does not carry Plymouth (or Barr Hill, my favourite) and I only had caramelized simple (and clearly do not have a julep strainer), but I sure do have fresh mint in the herb garden!

Faux Jadite is still nice

Spouse bought me a measure when he was out yesterday, which has already come in handy

Caramel simple

Chilled glass, an extra sprig of mint, and down the hatch!

Honestly, I’m really picky about mint in drinks. I like juleps and non-alcoholic mint hot or iced tea, but not much else. This, however, was really good, balanced and maybe a little too drinkable.